Public Agenda (Accra)
9 December 2011
editorial
Ghanaian politicians have the capacity to innovate – to provide solutions to the myriad of challenges that confront our development efforts.
The politician is often impregnated with ideas but attempts to give life to these ideas are often undermined by politicians themselves.
MASLOC, NYEP, LEAP, LESDEP may all be noble and well-meaning initiatives of politicians, meant to advance our collective aspiration of improving the lot of our people, but have been somewhat undermined by politicians as they seek to use them to achieve parochial political ends.
The trend that has emerged over time is that, every government would want to turn poverty alleviation programmes into vote-buying machineries and for rewarding party loyalty. They therefore move quickly upon their assumption of office to transfer or terminate the appointments of the heads of these programmes, and elevate their cronies to these positions. Naturally these cronies come into office with an uncompromising desire to please their benefactors and to ensure regime longevity, which invariably ensures that they continue to retain their positions.
The constitutional provision, which assigns powers to the president to appoint and to dismiss appointees without explanation to the public makes it difficult, indeed almost impossible to unpack the rationale or basis of the president’s decision to appoint or dismiss those he or his predecessor appoints, and this facilitates the president’s use of agencies and programmes established in the name of the state to his/her personal political ends.
The reason Ghana has no long term vision in terms of the direction of its economic development is precisely because the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) which is the state agency charged with the articulation and management of the country development agenda is so politicized that its unable to provide the kind of long term development framework that is shared by all political parties and citizens of this country. The chairman and commissioners of the NDPC always go with the defeated government, making it difficult to pursue a consistent development agenda. Ghana has as a result of this situation had to depend on short-medium term development planning, not linked to any long term vision.
To make any meaningful progress in our development efforts, it is important to free all state agencies and poverty reduction programmes from any form of party-political manipulation regardless of which government initiated them. The way to do this is to assign appointments to these agencies and programmes to the Public Services Commission. Surely, putting technocrats in charge of these agencies and programmes is certain to engender professionalism and therefore efficiency. It certainly will engender collective ownership; and the security of tenure which comes with the job in that process will ensure that the decisions of those in charge are in the national interest rather than in the interest of any particular political party.
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